Back in 1961, the ground-breaking British sketch comedy revue Beyond the Fringe featuring Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore took British comedy by storm, breaking old patterns and inspiring a new generation of comedians including the Monty Python troupe.
In the opening sketch, they had a commentary on America.
At the 2:57 mark, Jonathan Miller explains to Dudley Moore, who is on the eve of a trip to the US, the two-party system here, saying “They’ve got the Republican party, you see, which is the equivalent of our Conservative party and then there’s the Democratic party which is the equivalent of our Conservative party.”
That joke worked in 1961 because at that time there were significant differences between the Conservative and Labour parties in the UK, which were not reflected in the Republican and Democratic parties here.. It would not work as well now because, thanks to the neoliberalism of Tony Blair and now Keir Starmer, the Labour party is becoming indistinguishable from the Conservatives.
Actor Steve Coogan has blasted Starmer and the Labour party of betraying its supporters and warned that when angry voters see that neither party is looking after their interests, they will move towards Nigel Farage’s Reform party. His analysis rings true to what we see in the US as well.
Steve Coogan has accused Keir Starmer’s Labour government of a “derogation of all the principles they were supposed to represent” and said they were paving the way for the “racist clowns” of Reform UK.
The actor, comedian and producer said the party he had long supported was now for people “inside the M25” and described the prime minister’s first year in power as underwhelming.
“I knew before the election he was going to be disappointing. He hasn’t disappointed me in how disappointing he’s been,” he said.
Coogan spoke to the Guardian ahead of an address to the annual Co-op Congress in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, where he called for locally led grassroots movements to assemble across Britain and take back control from “multinational institutions and billionaires”.
…Coogan, 59, said he “agreed wholeheartedly” with the statement released by former Labour MP Zarah Sultana on Thursday night, when she announced she was quitting the party to co-lead a left-wing alternative with Jeremy Corbyn.
Sultana said Britain’s two-party system “offers nothing but managed decline and broken promises” and that Labour had “completely failed to improve people’s lives”.
Coogan said: “Everything she said in her statement I agree wholeheartedly. I wish I’d said it myself.” However, he added that he was “reserving judgment” as to whether to support the new party at future elections if they field candidates.
The Philomena star said he did not blame working people for voting for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
“The success of Reform, I lay squarely at the feet of the neoliberal consensus, which has let down working people for the last 40 years and they’re fed up,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who they vote for, nothing changes for them.
“Keir Starmer and the Labour government have leant into supporting a broken system. Their modus operandi is to mitigate the worst excesses of a broken system and all that is is managed decline. What they’re doing is putting Band-Aids on the gash in the side of the Titanic.”
In his most strongly worded attack on Labour yet, Coogan described the party’s priorities in the last year as “a derogation of all the principles they were supposed to represent”.
“We have a Labour government and it’s no different from a Conservative government in neglecting ordinary people,” he added.
…“It’s not just the fact that people are disempowered and feel like they have no autonomy. It’s compounded by the fact that these people, these multinationals, are enabled and supported by the government to keep their foot on the neck of working people,” he said.
It was “perfectly understandable” for working people to vote for Farage’s Reform in large parts of England, where many voters feel disenfranchised, Coogan said.
What is happening in the UK is strikingly similar to what we see in the US, except that here there is no need for a new party of ‘racist clowns’ for disaffected people to shift to because the racist clowns led by Trump have taken over the Republican party.
I’ve been thinking about politics in the U.S. too much lately, and why appeals to common sense or finding common ground, etc., just seem to go unacknowledged…
I think most of the problem is the worst people (Ailes, Murdoch, et al.) have taken over the media, and captured the minds of much of the populace. Combined with Reagan’s bullshit that gutted restrictions and regulations, we have a situation where a few obscenely rich individuals can spew their bullshit to uncritical minds, while muddying the waters about anything remotely factual. And then, on top of that, they are in bed with, if not the actual same individuals profiting from pollution, fossil fuel extraction and use, weapon sales, privately owned prisons for profit (that alone should be so abhorrent an idea to give anyone with any moral concerns a crisis…), profit-run healthcare, private education, tax-exempt megachurches, etc. And they have enough money, power, and influence to have more say in the laws and governance of the U.S. than the actual people (who mostly absorb their bullshit takes anyways…)
So, all the money, and all the media/communication (and a lot of the education, laws, public opinion, etc.) support whatever this small (by planetary population standards) group of ultra-wealthy elites want it to, and there is really no feasible way to regulate or counter this.
And, now with the advent of social media, tech giants, everyone having a smartphone, and using it constantly for damned-near-everything, and apps for everything, and all of them just vacuuming up all the data they can to feed into their predictive models and such…
There is an almost unrivaled ability for those who want to control things to specifically target individuals and suppress information, replace with misinformation and disinformation, that people are all too happy to ingest.
I don’t think we are going to make it out of this…
Bush Derangement Syndrome, Terrorist Fist Bump, Tan Suit, Let’s Go Brandon, Trump Derangement Syndrome, etc. -- we’ve all seen those study summaries that if you can strip the “political” language from things like the ACA, Social Security, Medicaid, etc.; that people widely support those plans. But then they go to the polls, and vote against those institutions and policies, because everything in their media consumption convinces them these things are “bad”, “evil”, “un-American”, and will personally make their lives more difficult.
I don’t know where else I’m going with this, but also wanted to say that I think a lot of these red-hat-folk are treating elections more like a sportsball event, where they just want their “team” to win/the opposing “team” to loose, without any concern about the end results outside of the “fans” feelings about defeat/triumph. I dunno, I never quite got sportsball…
That video is frighteningly accurate.
Jonathan Pie.
https://youtu.be/SpJhyyhuJrY?si=2zTlv0sFSHeKf2rN
Two of my relatives, who have been staunch Labour members for decades, have resigned their party memberships in the last week. The final strawb for them was the proscription of the non-violent direct action protest group Palestine Action under anti-terror legislation, making supporting them a criminal offence carrying a jail term of up to 14 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/05/palestine-action-activists-arrested-london-gandhi-statue
I would not have been able to understand this video without the captioning.
The president they are referring to is John F Kennedy.
I’ve never voted anything but Labour in my life. I’ve staunchly defended the record of Tony Blair who, tragically, will be mainly remembered for following the USA into the debacle in Iraq, erasing all the many, many positives of his premiership in the minds of anyone with a goldfish mind (i.e. the majority even of the people who voted for him back in the day, apparently). I held my nose and voted Labour when that deluded prick Corbyn was in charge because the alternative was literally the worst PM the country had ever had since the one immediately before and until the one immediately after, and held my nose and voted Labour AGAIN when the alternative was literally the worst PM the country had ever had since the one immediately before and until the one immediately after.
I was expecting to be disappointed by Starmer because hey -- 14 years of that shower of arseholes in charge had left the country on its knees, and unlike the apparent majority of people who voted Labour I do NOT expect miracles. I do, however, expect some basic Labour principles to be adhered to, as they were in Blair’s time. Life legitimately got measurably, visibly better for a LOT of people under Blair. It was never going to get that much better on any short timescale under Starmer simply because of the poison chalice he inherited. But he’s made it WORSE, and not even TRIED to use his MASSIVE mandate to do anything remotely courageous, like, say, taxing rich people/corporations.
I obviously will not be voting Reform at the next election, because I’m neither a Nazi nor a moron, and I’m not voting Tory because I don’t hate my children or anyone else’s, and I swore never to vote Lib Dem after the meretricious betrayal over student fees (they came to power in the coalition post-2010 having promised in their manifesto to abolish university tuition fees, then when they got a sniff of power not only reversed that but supported the Tories to TRIPLE them). I live in a ridiculously safe Tory seat (it stayed Tory even in the debacle landslide where former PM Truss lost her supposedly safe seat), so my vote really doesn’t count for much in the grand scheme. I’m therefore seriously considering next time casting a ballot for the Greens.
Honestly can’t believe it’s come to this. I hope I can feel better in four years. We’ll see.
sonof @6: I haven’t followed UK politics that much. How is Corbyn a deluded prick?
Rob #7
Good question. I look forward to the answer.
@6 sonof
So, pretty much what so many of us in the US have experienced. Welcome to the club. Let’s hope that a large portion of your voters don’t go full tilt bonkers like many of ours did. Nigel and the Don, what a pair that would be.
Well, if you choose to staunchly defend the record of a war criminal, that’s up to you. Yes, Blair did some good things -- and some bad ones aside from Iraq, but I consider it absolutely right that he will be mainly remembered for taking part in an illegal war based on lies -- which millions of us recognised as such at the time -- which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the rise of Daesh.
@lochaber:
And always remember that for Ailes that was deliberate and personal… Ailes was a Nixon staffer who believed that the big problem with the Watergate scandal wasn’t the bad stuff Nixon did, it was the fact that the media reported on it and made Nixon look bad and forced his resignation. Ailes spent most of his life after that deliberately building up an alternate media ecosystem (starting with Conservative Talk Radio in places where AM radio channels were cheap) specifically to lock people into a media bubble and guarantee that the next time a proto-fascist President got into power the people who listened to his stations wouldn’t be told this was a bad thing.
@Rob Grigjanis, 7:
Corbyn was a joke candidate. The loony left of the Labour party looked at the slate of candidates after Ed Milliband stood down, and saw everything they hated -- Blairites, essentially, and worse, two of them were women. A woman? Leading the Labour Party? People with a realistic chance of leading a Labour party chastened by defeat into a possible election win against a Tory party who now had an actual majority and were therefore off the leash. A Tory party that would be responsible for the catastrophic decision to hold a Brexit referendum. And if there’s one thing a properly left-wing Labour supporter can’t stand, it’s the possibility of coming close to being in power, or having a woman as leader.
But the left had a problem -- they didn’t have ANY credible candidates. Not a single person who looked like they were up to the job of being leader of the opposition, much less the sort of person the country could trust to be Prime Minister. This lack of candidates was obvious because as the deadline for submissions of candidacy approached, there wasn’t a single person from the left of Labour who threw their hat in the ring. Corbyn finally got his entry in with, IIRC, single digit MINUTES to spare.
What followed was a debacle in which it became clear that it was very easy, and, crucially, cheap to become a voting member of the Labour party… and membership soared. Whether the Tory-leaning Telegraph newspaper’s active encouragement for Tory voters to join up and vote Corbyn affected the result -- who can say? Corbyn swept to victory, since the sensible vote was about 170,000 and split three ways and the loony/Tory vote was 251,000 and all went to Corbyn.
He believed the hype and acted all triumphant. He equivocated over predictable and justified accusations of being soft on anti-semitism. And worst of all, when his party’s policy was to recommend voting Remain (as was the Tory party’s policy, as was every party’s policy apart from the actual Nazis), he refused to fully back that policy, making absolutely clear that he stood with Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, the British National Party and the rest of the far RIGHT in recommending a vote to Leave. It was an absolute betrayal of the people of the UK and entirely unforgivable.
Having watched the worst prime minister of my lifetime, David Cameron, walk off whistling after resigning in disgrace, Corbyn faced what soon became obvious was the new worst Prime Minister of my lifetime, Theresa May. When she bafflingly called a snap election at a disastrous time in her “leadership”, she frittered away a huge majority, but Corbyn failed, even against such self-evidently shit competition, to win. That didn’t stop him crowing about the “progress” they made, ludicrously claiming that although Labour hadn’t won the election, they had “won the argument”, whatever the FUCK that was supposed be worth, or indeed even mean.
Despite having lost an election by a relatively narrow margin to the worst Prime Minister of my lifetime, he didn’t have the good grace or self-awareness to fuck off and let someone competent take charge. He watched Theresa May leave office and be replaced by what everyone could have already predicted was going to be the new worst Prime Minister of my lifetime, the actually evil Alexander “Boris” Johnson. And when Johnson called an election, Corbyn shit the bed completely and the Labour party was wiped off the map electorally. The next constiuency over from where I grew up, the historic mining town of Leigh, voted Conservative for basically the first time ever. And it was not alone. Working class people in safe Labour seats right across the left-wing heartlands of the north, places comprehensively gutted of their souls in the 80s by Thatcher, took one look at Corbyn and said “not that cunt”. He all but destroyed the Labour party, and handed Johnson the mandate to govern worse than anyone could have imagined… at least until Liz Truss came along, crashed the economy and became the shortest-serving PM in UK history.
ALL of what’s happened since 2015 -- Brexit, Johnson, Truss, the lot -- is arguably directly the fault of Corbyn, a man who made Michael Foot look Prime Ministerial. (Michael Foot was Labour leader in 1983, and up against Margaret Thatcher fresh off a victory in the Falklands conflict he put out a manifesto promising, if elected, to unilaterally decommission the UK’s nuclear deterrent. This manifesto became notorious as “the longest suicide note in history”.) Foot was a better leader than Corbyn, because if nothing else he had the humility, self-awareness and concern for his country to step aside when it was obvious he was worse than useless. Corbyn staggered on in the teeth of the evidence, and even now is trying to work against the Labour party. He is a selfish, unprincipled traitor and I hold him in absolute contempt I usually reserve for Tories.
I hope this explains my comment.
I have one fairly major problem with the idea that Corbyn was a uniquely terrible -- and in particular, un-electable -- Labour leader: I simply don’t think the data supports it.
Let’s look at the popular vote totals for both Labour and Tories, for every general election since Tony Blair’s victory in 1997 -- a victory which is generally regarded as a massive, epoch-defining landslide:
1997:
Labour (Blair) -- 13,518,167
Tory (Major) -- 9,591,085
2001:
Labour (Blair) -- 10,724,953
Tory (Hague) -- 8,357,615
2005:
Labour (Blair) -- 9,552,376
Tory (Howard) -- 8,785,942
2010
Labour (Brown) -- 8,609,517
Tory (Cameron) -- 10,703,654
2015
Labour (Miliband) -- 9,347,324
Tory (Cameron) -- 11,334,726
2017
Labour (Corbyn) -- 12,877,918
Tory (May) -- 13,636,684
2019
Labour (Corbyn) -- 10,269,051
Tory (Johnson) -- 13,966,454
2024
Labour (Starmer) -- 9,708,716
Tory (Sunak) -- 6,828,925
[All numbers taken from Wikipedia]
Now, obviously, there are a lot of caveats to bear in mind here… The two major ones are that (a) the UK doesn’t have a presidential system, and people do not vote directly for parties or party leaders, and (b) elections happen in more-or-less unique historical contexts, and in particular, Brexit is the elephant in the room here.
Still, having said that, I don’t see how you can look at those numbers and conclude that Corbyn was a uniquely awful, unpopular pick. In fact, the one thing we definitely can say is that Labour under his leadership polled higher than at any time since the Blair years, and in particular, against May, they polled higher than any time since that epochal landslide victory back in ’97.
The reason he didn’t win is because the context was different. In particular, however unpleasant or unreasonable you or I may personally find it, a heck of a lot of people really were very much in favour of Brexit, and the Tories were seen (rightly enough) as the party to make it happen. Also, there is simply no getting away from the other unpleasant and unreasonable fact that Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson’s “Boris” character was (and indeed, somehow still is) immensely popular with the sort of people who don’t realise that PG Wodehouse was taking the piss, and in fact long to be ruled over by some plummy-voiced Hooray Henry who went to all the right schools and can pretend to speak Latin.
Now, you could argue that the Remain side could have done a much, much better job of making their case, and that’s both perfectly reasonable and a whole other massive topic. (For the record, I’d agree.) But the idea that Corbyn himself is personally responsible for the unfortunate fact that a very large chunk of the English (note, “English”, not “UK”) electorate were and are xenophobic arseholes who always hated the EU (even though they couldn’t accurately describe it) and desperately wanted some sub-Wodehouse comedy character to put one over on the hated French, get rid of all the foreigners, and bring back pre-decimal money along with their lost childhoods is not, in my view, either reasonable or supportable. You may not like it, but there you go.
One other consideration that I think is worth bearing in mind, given the nature of the UK electoral system, is that Corbyn has always been remarkably popular with the only people who actually vote directly for him -- his constituents. Again, I don’t think that’s the mark of a uniquely unpopular and un-electable politician.
Finally, we also need to remember that the level of hate that the Blairite wing of the party bears for the left is such that there was an entire section of the party machinery actively working against Corbyn, to the extent of deliberately undermining their own candidates during those crucial general elections -- and we have the internal memos to prove it. How come those people never cop for any of the blame? How come they don’t get called “traitors”, even though they were literally working for the other side?
sonofrojblake and Dunc, thanks for your comments.
The worst verifiable thing I’ve heard about Corbyn is that he supports Arsenal.
PS My impression is that the British Mainstream Media did a collective hatchet job on Corbyn, much as the US Media did on Al Gore before the 2000 US election. I’m sure there are many people who still believe that Gore claimed to have invented the internet.
Rob, @ #15: Well, they pretty much always do that to every Labour leader… The difference in Corbyn’s case was that there was a significant (not to mention media-savvy and well-connected) faction within his own party that were very actively colluding with them. Although I must note that of all the things you could describe Corbyn as, “media-savvy” definitely isn’t one of them, and he wasn’t exactly shy about handing out free ammunition.
(This is my 3rd post in this thread, so I will not be able to participate further.)
He opposes the supply of arms to Ukraine to defend itself against fascism. That’s in stark contrast to others on the Labour left, such as John McDonnell, who has been stalwart in his support for Ukraine. A great pity that it wasn’t McDonnell rather than Corbyn who stood for the left in the 2015 leadership election -- a matter of chance, I believe: McDonnell had health problems at the time or he would probably have been chosen.
However I agee with Dunc@13 that the figures simply don’t support the claim that Corbyn was a particularly disastrous leader of the party. In addition to those figures Dunc quoted, he also presided over a remarkable growth in party membership -- which Starmer has succeeded in reversing.
Another disreputable aspect of Corbyn: his long association with some repulsive members of the self-styled “Socialist Workers’ Party”.